The room has changed today. I have no place to stay. I'm thinkin' about the subway.


20 years ago or so, television dealt me one of many images that would completely fuck me up.

I have since forgiven television, mostly. But here's the story:

I was seven. My family stopped at an Ohio Red Roof Inn on one of our pre-Thanksgiving drives down to Louisville. After whatever shows we'd wanted to watch had finished and we'd gone to bed, Dad continued to flip through channels long after he thought everyone was asleep. Never a quick sleeper, I silently watched through half-open eyelids. At one point, he lit upon a film sequence in which a ponytailed assassin strapped on a rifle and scaled a tree for a vantage point from which to watch a young girl and her father exit their abode. The viewer then observed through the gunman's scope as he shot the girl in the throat. The girl gasped horribly and clutched her neck as my dad then changed the channel.

Though I never mentioned to my parents that I'd been traumatized by the clip, I was terrified to go outside for at least a few months, and would anxiously glance up in all nearby trees when I was forced to do so. Slowly, it migrated to the back of my brain, lying dormant along with any number of other inexplicably cruel images that comprise the baggage I carry around.

Back to present day: the other night, Bev and I watched Firestarter. Turns out the image that haunted me as a kid was Academy Award renouncer and Man Getting Hit by Football star George C. Scott shooting Drew Barrymore with a tranq dart. Drew turned out okay. In fact, she wound up killing Scott with her pyrokinetic powers. And when she did, it unshackled ages-old demons that then bolted from my mind like malnourished fireflies from a shattered mason jar.

Then Bev and I watched X-Men. I now have different baggage. The kind that comes from sitting through X-Men.

*     *     *

I no longer have a place to live when I move to Ann Arbor. Yesterday, Marianne left a voicemail telling me that her job or housing or whatever fell through, so she's going to have to remain in her apartment and not sublet it to me. She was very apologetic--she must have said, "I feel horrible" five times in her two-minute voicemail--and I can't be upset with her, really, since it sounds like her plans are lying in 10-car road wrecks too, but it's not a happy development. And I feel stupid for not predicting that something like this would happen.

I'm pretty sure Paul Erdős ruined the possibility of crashing in the Math Reviews offices for everyone, too.

CURRENT MUSIC: Diamond Hoo Ha by Supergrass.
CURRENT MOOD: Feeling sorry for myself/panic mode.
CURRENT MOST RECENT ANIMAL I'VE SEEN IN PERSON THAT I'D NEVER SEEN BEFORE: A porpoise. Saw one on an oceanside picnic with Bev and her parents yesterday. It was nice.